Green Space: Treating the weeds that grow in winter

It seems that any time I have a meal with several people, there is always at least one who grabs the salt shaker and lavishly decorates everything on the plate. If the table is mostly people of a certain age, the conversation then inevitably slides to blood pressure.

I donít worry about my blood pressure as long as it stays below my golf score, and Iím a lousy golfer. I jump up and down in celebration for an occasional bogie. Nevertheless, I donít use salt.

Decades ago, when I was studying to get my certification to use restricted pesticides, much more potent than the stuff you can buy at the big box store, I was looking at a list showing LD50 ratings. LD50 stands for lethal dose for 50 percent of the test subjects. They feed stuff to lab animals, and when half of them die, they make note of how much it takes Ė LD50. Included in the list, just for fun I guess, there were also some common household items thrown in. I learned that common table salt is more toxic than just about any pesticide you can buy for your garden and I threw out all the salt in the house. For real serious toxicity, donít even think about Clorox or ammonia or caffeine or nicotine or even -- gasp! -- theobromine, an ingredient in chocolate.

Organic gardeners use salt to laboriously (and usually ineffectively) kill slugs. I use Slug Bait with 2,4,6,8-tetramethyl-1,3,5,7-tetraoxycyclo-octane (close friends call it Metaldehyde), which is a bit more toxic than sodium chloride (the- chemical formerly known as salt), but far less toxic than the aspirin those folks take to alleviate the repetitive motion pain from shaking all that salt.

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Another problem with salt is that you have to do it when the slugs are out. At night. Itís dark at night. Or you have to find where they are hiding, and those things hide better than weapons of mass destruction.

The same folks use vinegar to kill weeds. I use Roundup. And here there is a clear advantage. Roundup is safer and w-a-y more effective. Vinegar makes the tops of the weeds irritable for a while, then they grow back. Roundup kills weeds down to the root.

Some people say Roundup doesnít work any better than vinegar, but that is because they are using it wrong. You spray Roundup on the leaves and it transports to the roots, killing them, thus killing the whole weed. Sometimes there is not enough leaf area to absorb enough spray to kill the entire root. That can happen if the weeds have been trimmed (or hit with vinegar) or with weeds with large, fleshy roots that have become well established. In those cases you need to let the tops grow to increase the leaf area and do it again. There is no wrong way to use vinegar because there is no right way.

Why am I thinking about weeds, the one part of summer we are trying to forget, now? Because there is a perverse group of weeds that prefer to grow in the winter. They are mostly small, mat forming weeds that can pop up here and there and quickly cover a wide area. They actually bloom in February, though not any flowers you would admire.

You can ignore them until spring, or you can avoid them with Preen, a weed preventer that you scatter on the ground. There are two forms, one safer than salt, one safer than water. The latter, sold as Preen for Vegetables is basically corn gluten, and for the neurotically safety conscious might be the choice, but it only lasts for about a month. The regular Preen lasts about three months, which takes us into a season when we worry more about dandelions.

If you stuck your Preen in the basement at the end of autumn, you were too hasty. Drag it out and treat paths and cracks now. Save the vinegar for salad dressing, if you donít mind eating toxins.

Duane Campbell is a nationally known agricultural expert from Bradford County. He is the author of ďBest of Green Space; 30 Years of Composted Columns.Ē He may be reached at R6, Box 6092, Towanda, PA 18848, or by e-mail at dcamp911@gmail.com for questions or comments.